Windows 8 is easy on the eyes. Microsoft made a lot of adjustments to the operating system since it was first revealed in its Consumer Preview, and many of those have bettered the fit and finish of both its user experiences: Metro and Desktop. The Windows team also tried to add a few things along the way to ease users' transition from previous Windows releases, while also helping people who may have never touched a Microsoft platform before.

To help you find your way around this new, undiscovered country of a user interface, we've put together a tour in images beginning with your first startup. Here are the landmarks you'll need, and a few points of interest along the way.

Starting up

Enlarge/ On your first login, Windows 8 runs a short animated tutorial on how to find your way around with mouse (and for tablets, with touch). It may do a little to blunt the confusion some users will experience trying to get around the interface.

Enlarge/ For example, launch Settings from the Start screen, and you get contextual options for settings at the top. More universal settings commands are at the bottom: information about your network connectivity, volume settings, screen brightness, a tool to hide pop-up notifications, and a Power button to turn the PC off or put it to sleep. There's also access here to "Change PC Settings," which opens up a Metro version of the control panel.

Setting up and getting around

Enlarge/ The PC Settings menu is where most of the tasks associated with setting up Windows 8 are handled (though many, such as adding a Windows 8 PC or tablet to a domain, still require the use of the more traditional Control Panel from Windows 8's desktop interface). Personalization includes a selection of lock screen images (including your own photos), Start screen themes, and the ability to set the picture associated with your account.

Enlarge/ Some of the themes for the Start screen are a little bit frightening.

Enlarge/ When you set up Windows 8, Microsoft encourages you to set up a "Microsoft account" using Microsoft's live service. This links an e-mail address to your personal login (it doesn't need to be a live.com or Hotmail address), and gives you the option of syncing your personalization settings between multiple Windows 8 computers. When you open PC Settings after your first login, you're prompted to "trust" the PC, adding it to a list of computers associated with your account and allowing synchronization to happen.

Enlarge/ With a mouse, you can escape from PC Settings by hovering over a corner on the right and clicking on the Start charm, or going to the left side and clicking on the upper right to bounce back to the last screen you were on. You can also use a mouse movement from the upper left to bring up this view of all your open application screens. Then, navigate to a specific one or right-click on it to close the app (or in some cases, "snap" the window to the right or left side of your screen for a split-screen view).

Enlarge/ You can even do the "snapped" thing in Desktop view, splitting your view between a Desktop app and a Metro app to, for example, Facebook message a colleague while writing a review.

Enlarge/ The Desktop screen is where all non-Metro applications run in Windows 8, and it's where you need to go to access more advanced setup features for the OS. Just as with the Start screen and Metro apps, the "charms" come up on the right side of the screen.

I'm thoroughly enjoying xbox music free streaming. The ads is far apart and it's just mostly advert for the music pass right now. This could definitely be the killer feature that will take Surface and the like forward despite initial low apps situation. Pandora is probably making a bad business decision for not adopting win8 early. The more time people spend with Win8, the more essential xbox music will become.

Ugh. A solution looking for a problem to solve. It may be better than sliced bread, but with age my mind is crusting over and at some point i just want the damned kids to stay off my lawn ... and out of my computer interface. Go paradigm somewhere else...

"One thing hasn't changed about Windows's "Blue Screen of Death"—it's still blue. But Microsoft has added an emoticon to show that they feel your pain."

It's making me emotional just looking at it.

That said, it's a whole lot less scary than a real BSOD. A little nicer on consumers if it has to happen at all.

One thing that irked me about past Windows was when error messages would show up in pop-up message boxes you couldn't copy/paste the text from.

This was especially annoying when you got a huge error message like "XYZ could not initialize due to process blah blah having explosive diarrhea while it was injecting pron into your server." or whatever.

Is there any word on if that's been changed? Personally, I think they should make all pop-up message boxes use selectable / copyable text. Makes googling up issues easier.

I think the lack of an always visible clock is more important than most reviewers realize. It may take some time using the system constantly before it occurs to them how often they actually checked the time.

Pausing a file copy??? That is a feature that I haven't seen in a long time. I don't think I've seen that since BeOS

I'd be more impressed if they abused / integrated the windows task scheduler into more things.

EG: you select 400gb of pron to copy from drive A to B ... you right-click the files and select something like "schedule for later copy", then it brings up a painless scheduler to let you designate a time to do it when you're not around. I'm guessing you can ad-hoc this via a program that auto-backs stuff up, but it just seems like the windows task scheduler is one of the best kept secrets from joe avg user.

"One thing hasn't changed about Windows's "Blue Screen of Death"—it's still blue. But Microsoft has added an emoticon to show that they feel your pain."

It's making me emotional just looking at it.

That said, it's a whole lot less scary than a real BSOD. A little nicer on consumers if it has to happen at all.

One thing that irked me about past Windows was when error messages would show up in pop-up message boxes you couldn't copy/paste the text from.

This was especially annoying when you got a huge error message like "XYZ could not initialize due to process blah blah having explosive diarrhea while it was injecting pron into your server." or whatever.

Is there any word on if that's been changed? Personally, I think they should make all pop-up message boxes use selectable / copyable text. Makes googling up issues easier.

But you have been able to copy message box contents for years!

Try pressing ctrl-c to copy the contents to the clipboard - no need to select part of the text.

Mobile fanboys are all hot and wet about how clean the interface is, and how 'tablets are the wave of the future'... blah, blah, blah, but for the ONE BILLION personal computers that exist in the world that AREN'T tablets, Windows 8 looks like a really half-assed attempt at something new. It totally does NOT feel like an integrated, well-thought-through OS overhaul. And the colors - holy cow - we're back to the 8-bit ANSI palette? Seriously? And flat 2-dimensional tiles are the best they could come up with? Just awful. This is a design that would have been cool in the late 1980's, but today it looks atrocious.

I won't be buying Windows 8. Just like I skipped Vista, I'm skipping 8. #Windows8Fail

I think the lack of an always visible clock is more important than most reviewers realize. It may take some time using the system constantly before it occurs to them how often they actually checked the time.

For what it's worth, I run a second screen and I have my email client along side a clock gadget I got from the Windows 8 app store. Big analog clock with a small calendar. Nice, but it all takes up a lot of real estate. Another thing is that in this configuration, even though my big screen is primary, when I press the Windows key the Start screen is on the smaller monitor because of the clock app.

I use Thunderbird for email because the included MS email client doesn't support POP-3 accounts, only IMAP. I've had my email address for nearly 15 years and updating everyone to a new one would be a major pain.

Well, it shows a string of mini open Metro app windows. So, while it does technically do something, it's not really something anyone would use until someone manages to create a Metro app that's useful on a desktop.

Ugh. A solution looking for a problem to solve. It may be better than sliced bread, but with age my mind is crusting over and at some point i just want the damned kids to stay off my lawn ... and out of my computer interface. Go paradigm somewhere else...